there is a law and a provision in the life of grace that all those men
come to discover who live before God as Earlston lived, a provision that
secures to such men's souls a depth, and an inwardness, and an increasing
exercise that carries them on to reaches of inward sanctification that
the ruck and run of so-called Christians know nothing about, and are
incapable of knowing.

Such men as Earlston, while the daily rush of outward things is let in
deeply into their hearts, are not restricted to these things for the
fulness of their inward exercise; their own hearts, though there were no
outward world at all, would sufficiently exercise them to all the gifts
and graces and attainments of the profoundest spiritual life. For one
thing, when once Earlston had begun to keep watch over his own heart in
the matter of its motives--it was David Dickson, one fast-day at Irvine,
on 1 Sam. ii., who first taught Gordon to watch his motives--from that
day Rutherford and Livingstone, and all his family, and all his fellow-
elders saw a change in their friend that almost frightened them. There
was after that such a far-off tone in his letters, and such a far-off
look in his eyes, and such a far-off sound in his voice as they all felt
must have come from some great, and, to them, mysterious advance in his
spiritual life; but he never told even his son William what it was that
had of late so softened and quieted his proud and stormy heart. But, all
the time, it was his motives. The baseness of his motives even when he
did what it was but his duty and his praise to do, that quite killed
Earlston every day. The loathsomeness of a heart that hid such motives
in its unguessed depths made him often weep in the woods which his
grandfather had sanctified by his Bible readings a century before.
Rutherford saw with the glance of genius what was going on in his
friend's heart, when, in one letter, not referring to himself at all,
Earlston suddenly said, 'If Lucifer himself would but look deep enough